Milestone for Lankhorst Offshore
Deepwater rope manufacturer Lankhorst Offshore has reached a major rope industry milestone with over 2,000,000m of mooring lines produced over the past ten years at its factories in Portugal and Brazil.
Lankhorst deepwater mooring lines are used on many major offshore mooring projects around the world, and the milestone was achieved during production of the mooring lines for the Energean Power FPSO for the Karish and Tanin gasfields.
Lankhorst Offshore manufactures deepwater mooring lines based on Cabral 512 polyester ropes. They utilise high efficiency sub-rope cores laid parallel within a filter system and an outer braided jacket. Each sub-rope is monitored during rope manufacture to ensure all sub-ropes have equal tension and length. Typically, Cabral ropes include seven to eighteen sub-ropes dependent on the mooring project; each sub-rope is a braided construction, giving a 100% torque free rope.
Rope design and construction has evolved over the past decade to reflect the changing demands on deepwater mooring. Following the successful deployment of deepwater mooring lines for the Tahiti spar in the Gulf of Mexico, Lankhorst Offshore has set world records for the highest Minimum Breaking Load (MBL) mooring ropes ever produced, and the first polyester ropes manufactured with cut resistant jacket using Dyneema fibre for Goliat FPSO for Eni Norge. For even greater protection to the mooring line, Lankhorst was the first company to produce a double layer cut resistant jacket with Dyneema fibre for the Aasta Hansteen spar for HHI-Technip.
“Two million metres of deepwater mooring line is an important manufacturing milestone that reflects not only our production capability but also our technical and engineering skills and expertise”, says Rui Faria, Senior Vice President Oil & Gas Synthetics of Lankhorst Offshore. “Compared with our first mooring lines, our production is more streamlined allowing us manufacture ropes that are lighter, stronger and in many cases more durable to withstand the rigours of 30 years deployment in often congested subsea environments.”
From its Brazilian manufacturing facility in Queimados, Rio de Janeiro, Lankhorst has led the development of the Cabral 512 deepwater mooring rope and its deployment for major offshore Brazil pre-salt oil field development projects for Petrobras, SBM Offshore, APL, SOFEC, Teekay, and OOGTK. Reflecting growing environmental concerns and cost pressures on the offshore industry, Lankhorst has integrated larger reels into its rope production processes at its state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. This allows multiple mooring rope segments per reel, streamlining mooring system deployment offshore. In addition, the company was the first supplier to develop returnable shipping reels/cradles – once used they are sent back to Lankhorst for re-use with large project cost savings while reducing the carbon-footprint for deepwater mooring.